their foot soldiers with because, they may not have the kind of terrorist leaders as part of an organizational network of the finance years but they -- ideology is something they import from the outside dance to the extent of this interact with their mental dilapidation or their mental -- other personal or political grievances. difficult to fathom what to do about it. this was mentioned earlier as well. these guys could be criminals who are radicalized, could be just criminals, could be folks who are idiosyncratic, have funny behavior patterns. difficult to come out with measures per say and i would look at the ideology, as you mentioned. as i more important object study, very right in saying it

is important how these lone wolfs are incubated, how they are made, much rather than how to perpetrate the act or how to play in the act. the lone wolf terrorist needs to be studied end lone wolf terrorism is hard to see your eyes, to study until the absence of case studies. every attack is a unique and special with a different method and different ideological impact and so on. and it could be used by terrorists and known terrorists. >> spike bowman, may i ask you a

question about dan forsman point of view? one concern is the relevant intelligence and sharing of intelligence in terms of different agencies. how do you say this in light of recent revelation of the nsa struggling terms of the question of the civil liberties concerns that you worked on for so many years? >> civil liberties, excuse me, civil liberties was always one of the biggest concerns we had at the fbi because the fbi is, unlike nsa or the central intelligence agency, 95% of what the nsa collected are against u.s. persons, not foreigners. we have always been very

concerned about that. i probably received at least one phone call a day from agents in the field who ask and i do this, should i do this, where is the line? i'm mentioned that only to emphasize the fact that this is a real issue. if you come up to today and look at what the nsa is doing, several different things. first of all, what the nsa is doing is collecting data data which is constitutionally not protected. it is third-party information. it does not belong to you. it belongs to the telephone companies. they can do whatever they want with it except give it to a federal officer without being compelled to do so. that is one thing. i will say that when i argue for

the creation of that statute, article 215 of the patriot act, when i argued for that one i never anticipated and i don't think anybody ever anticipated it would be used as it is being used today. we looked at it as something that would target a single person for something. that is another thing that is happening. if you take the program and work it backwards a bit to 9/11, if we had had the opportunity at 9/11 to collate telephone messages, public addresses and frequent flyer numbers, none of which is constitutionally protected we would have had the possibility of discovering all 19 hijackers in the united states. i am not telling you we would have prevented 9/11 from happening because if we had we would have discovered all of

them here and we would have been following them and watching them and saw them get on the airplanes, 99% certain that what would have happened is the fbi agents who were following them would have noted the plane they got on, where they were going and called san diego field office and told them to pick them up when they arrived. my point is you can get this information from valuable information of constitutionally and protected. the thing you have to ask yourself and this is what the public needs to ask itself, two phases by the flip side of the question here, one question is do you want the government to do everything it can to protect you? the other question is do you want the government to look and record every time you visit a web site or make a phone call?

those are real questions. right now i will tell you that as a matter of law, what the nsa is doing for privacy purposes is not a privacy intrusion. i will leave it to the judges to determine whether the activity is lawful, even senior judges have said it is so i will rest on that but as a matter of privacy law and no one's privacy is being affected by this program. >> thank you very much for this clarification. i suggest that we develop some sort of discussion in terms of, number one, the radicalization of process of some of these individuals called away from alienation or whatever it is, secondly, the founder's strategies that are available to

deal with these on the local level, the national level and the international level, in the audience, very broad experience in government and outside government and i would like to invite them to participate first, work for many years in the counterterrorism office, michael swetnam, will you share some of your views? you can come up here if you like. >> maybe i can project. first of all i want to pick up something spike bowman said about people have a tendency for violent acts. there's a psychological aspect to this of course and we saw this at the ira when they reach agreement, some people could not put down the tools, the real

ira. one of the tools we haven't talked about is the fbi conducted sting operation against lone wolfs. if i can get your thoughts or anyone else working for the fbi, what are the guidelines? when do you start on this? the other thing that occurs to me as a psychological aspect. some similarities between people who conduct violence for various reasons like the shootings, mass shootings we had, people who do it for terrorist motives. part of the problem is detecting somebody before they go off the deep end. i am struck how many times when they identified the culprit and neighbors say we didn't know, he seemed to be a nice guy, nothing out of line and turns out sometimes there person indicators along the lines like my daughter in the same

neighborhood as the boston bomber, covered in the new york times, lee later that people said he sounded strange or radical. where is that dividing line with privacy, where people record? there is still a fuzzy area. we haven't been able to draft. getting back to the tools it seemed one of them is the nsa intercepts the patterns you talk about and the other is the sting operations. the third is the deradicalize asian. i slightly disagree with you, you can't get rid of the ideology perhaps but if you could somehow discourage people from acting on the ideology, that is a hard thing to measure. hard to measure what you succeed or don't succeed in. >> you come into the realm of

the up media. at one time in your life you cover this event for the media. does the media have a role in terms of radicalization process? >> there are two aspects. covering washington and overseas, there are certain attempts, the glamorization of romantic freedom fighters, and was recruited to the state department in 1985 when secretary shultz wanted to start a public diplomacy campaign against terrorism. one of the things we found is especially in europe and the middle east people tended to glamorize terrorists and the media plays a role, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by

carrying, reporting the claims with -- without counterbalancing and when there is an incident it is always difficult because reports come out sometimes, reporters reporting what they hear from police officials or local officials who only have part of the story which is why there's so much confusion around and another aspect which we ought to deal with at the state department. there was an attachment in london, the libyan or iranian embassy, the press, the tv was showing where scotland yard people were stations and there have been issues and trying to restrain the press from quoting information or reporting thing that might be useful. in mumbai there are picking up radio or tv reports wherever the security forces were. there is an issue of restraining

the press. it is difficult in this country and the u.k. because you have so many local tv reporters out there and they are rather green or don't have good relationships with the police or local authorities and last pitch is important for local authorities, fbi to try to develop good relationships in advance with the key in local media so there's a development of trust where they hold off on something. >> okay. are very any other questions from the audience at this point? yes, please. identify yourself for the record. here is the mic. >> my name is carlos stern. i am retired. i spent some years in the

pentagon. this is not a field by worked in professionally but i am interested and grateful, with regard to the example of the 9/11 hijackers, the real clue that was missed was a bunch of foreigners wanting to go to flight school in florida and expressed openly they had no need to learn to take off or land and that was reported because certainly was a very bright signal. as they say the metaphor is connecting the dots. the same was the russians told the united states that these guys were probably trouble and that was not followed up. many other examples, the reason i am bringing visa is the old adage, one learns more from mistakes than from successes and i was hoping to hear a

discussion of failures and how we have lined information from failure to do better next time. >> with respect to your example, you conflated two different things with the flight schools. one was a bunch of people, foreigners who were taking flight lessons around the country. not that they were not trying to learn to take off or land but were just learning to fly. what was misquoted in the papers was the instance of the company masawi was taking lessons from said he didn't want to take off or land when that is precisely what he wanted to do. that was misrepresented by the company and reported that way in the newspapers. i can't answer the issue about the boston bombers because i wasn't with the fbi at the time but i will give you a little

vignette. when the terrorists screening center was opened up, this is the center that has the names of all suspected terrorists, a large number because there are many aliases people confusing you can spell mohammad 40 different ways, literally. we asked other countries if they wanted to give the names of known or suspected terrorists and a number of countries did. russia immediately sent us 300 names, all chechens. a little vignette. i don't know what was going on in the fbi's mind but that was the first thing i thought of when i read the papers. you are quite right about hoping to have learned from our mistakes. one of the issues frankly, one of the learning experiences is the 215 program today, trying to

have an ability for period of five years to look back and see if there is something we missed a long away. that is one of the things, whether it survives or not i don't know. i have no idea but that is one of the learning lessons we had at the time. >> you worked on this issue for a long time. >> several things come to mind. if i could make three points on comments that were made. we need to be cognizant, we need to recognize it is not just for role of the media when an event is playing out but in fact the legitimizing or even the magnifying role of the media that is frequently sought by the lone wolf terrorists or small organization or the group, the act itself is done in order to maximize or gain recognition or

media attention. that is part and parcel of the exercise. interest act that falls in the forest doesn't get you much at the end of the day. the media role is a significant one and one that we still don't fully understand. the urge to turn the boston bombers into -- the cover of rolling stone. that says, who would guess he would be the first guy in his class? the second thing we are conscious of, all your points are right on the mark but we need to be cognizant of the fact that jihadis terrorism, islamic terrorism is only -- incredibly only one fins slice of the the continuing when we start looking at those people who we would characterize as the lone wolfs. if you look at american history over the last hundred years we

have time and time and time again home grown, lone wolf -- blow up the los angeles times or blowing up schools or carried out 1-act or another, blown up backpacks in the middle of olympic park in atlanta. none of that had anything to do with islam or jihad. it had precious little to do with anything but their own particular bias focus or concern at that point in time. regrettably we are not in possession of the guy who gets drunk and looks for his keys under the light on the street because that is where the light is when we lost him in the alley. finally, one of the points i would make and i would go back to it, i remain concerned, ambivalent, not terrifically happy when i start hearing about things, you have no right to

your new data, it is not protected. the second question is can society survive? the fair question to ask is, can survive in any limitless number of lone bomber type attacks. if you don't believe we can do it, take a look at what happens in downtown baghdad every day. the iraqi nation continues to function after a fashion and yet you -- as that level of carnage playing on the streets of the united states i dare say we would all be hiding in our basements or maybe not. the concern i would have is if we are going to pursue perfect security, perfect protection, perfect detection, perfect, maximize our ability to look at every click on the internet as a way of looking at that person, might be an islamic radical, might be a radical environmentalist, might be anti-abortion, might not like

people with blonde hair, we are arguably sliding down a slippery slope, we have a toboggan and we are heading for the bottom fast. >> i would like to pile on with a slight twist and this is a technology angle to the whole thing. there will be lone wolf packs, usually there is someone helping on the side. since mankind groups together and crawled out of the cave, well-documented that a certain percentage of us of any population or society is just nuts and those postal and kills people. so whether it is motivated by ideology or just somebody going over the edge, getting a gun and killing a handful of people, it is part of human nature. the question, however, is as

technology provides tools to these terrorists or nuts to do harm and as that technology gets better and better and more available, the impact of those will lone wolves or lone wolf packs grows exponentially. a few guns or a hand full of hand grenades or even a panel truck full of fertilizer, you could killed dozens, maybe hundreds of people. one person can kill 700 people. timothy mcveigh is one of the most successful lone wolfs we had in a hundred years. he killed hundreds of people. technology is making available today, what technology 20 years from now, what is technology going to make available to lone wolf, 40 or 50 years from now? already gene sequencers are available on the internet and people with the knowledge to sequence and grow almost

unthinkable biological organisms are graduating daily, ph.d. in biochemistry will tell you it doesn't take but a bachelor's degree today to know how to get aids genes sequencer a genes se something really bad. there are individuals out there who will use that. when they get past finding again and reached for biology or more lethal technology, what will be the needs of society to make sure that doesn't happen? today we can look at it and say it is going to happen a few times a year and is not worth sacrificing our civil liberties for but if the potential grows to the point of almost certainty that sooner or later one of these nuts will get a hold of something really lethal we might look at it differently and say it is worth sacrificing whatever we have to to make sure

significant portion of the population, hundreds of thousands or millions are not put in jeopardy. you know when we will have that discussion? we should be having it now about what our civil liberties, how we will deal with this. we will have the discussion whether we need to find a terrorists before they do it. we have that discussion the day after one of them killed million people. it is not a question of if, it is a question of when. how much longer? >> i certainly concur with you. the thing is from academic studies for a long time, as you mentioned human nature is the same. the first lone wolf attack took place in the garden of eden. when we talk about cain killed abel. seriously. nothing is new under the sun

except technology. you spoke specifically, you mentioned the weapons of mass destruction, the cyber. i fully agree with you. today if i am lone wolf and i am trying to bring society to its knees, i can kill hundreds of people, exactly, in order to derail for example trains or to try to choke us with electricity, turn off a electricity and so forth. the point i am making is we have to be vigilant as a society. now i have my colleague, donald wallace. >> thank you. usually make closing remarks and maybe i will but this discussion, i think, raises profound the the issue which

principally my neighbor, kyle olson, touched on. when you think of the sheer spectrum of events, that they are going to be energetic, restless, violent, ingenious people and you get technology, let's assume something big is going to happen. my very intelligent english wife believes in safety. she is intelligent and wants society to protect itself and the issue is ayman al-zawahiri -- what kyle olson touched on. i teach a course on the subject of what the nsa is doing and i think this will be the issue. society is going to have to learn -- strike that. why is it trying to do it? in good faith it wants to protect us and it has technology of a different kind. the issue really is can society learned in of that our political -- i won't use the word leaders,

political colleagues can intelligently decide what to do? my students write papers all the time about telephone, prison, all these programs, they are all constitutional issues, the collection itself doesn't constitute -- individual query's, the nsa itself is making quasi probable cause determinations that gibson to our stuff. if you look at the travel records, all this stuff is publicly available. that is the real issue. you are quite right. america will not want to lose its fourth amendment or first election -- amendment protections. we don't really know what our preferences should be. i had as little tolerance for ed snowden as i had for the snake

in the garden of eden. cain killed abel outside the garden of eden. no respect whatsoever, none. he is an arrogance of important person. he raised these issues which for some reason our political intellectual leaders didn't. that is really they never define lone wolfs because there are more lone wolfs that wolves apparently and a lot of people arrived. it is interesting fur yonah alexander who is a great authority on terrorism. typically terrorism has meant political action to intimidate others. hard to say the sandy hook killer was that or lee harvey oswald. we have to more urgent focus and definition focus on this plague of unpleasant things and focus

very much on the coping, maybe more than the definition and that kind of stuff. >> i have a couple points in response to mike's statement. firstly, given the resource constraints in a world of dwindling resources, it is hard to monitor something when you don't know what the characteristics are, what to monitor, what to look for. that is one constrained. there's so much talk about a risk base monitoring risk-based security measure where you look at assessment. no one has a single definition of risk as well or terrorism or low wolf as well. that is one constrained. many look at that and in terms of a potential lone wolf had the

means to perpetrate terrorist attack, not only having means but having the environment, the grievances, having inspiration, that lone wolf is capable of launching. it is interplay between having the resolve to perpetrate something and having the conditions in the environment to perpetrate it along with external influences. >> these are salient points and there is a lot to be taken from this. let me add i want to go back to your question number 2 can society survive. i raised baghdad as a model of a society that continues to function under the most horrific conditions and there are others around the world as well and the

question has been raised what if that were happening here? the united states is arguably the most resilient society in the world and yet we are probably one of these societies that is least willing to confront the issue of resilience in the face of actions like this. ..

survived the blitz. they survived two world wars which reduce many other cities to rubble and they soldier on. which the expression? survived the irish. let's not forget. mainly survived to be irish. but again at the end of the day as a nation we need to be prepared to understand that all the efforts to go forward, whether it's been able to effectively identify the telltale signs of proto- radicalization, whether it's been able to successfully get into every internet search on the web. whether it's been able to look forward just to have the ultimate filters going through the metadata. things are going to happen. the degree to which nsa and the fbi and our media and our politicians and others have

defined our response to terrorism, our actions towards terrorism, as being pursuit of a risk-free society. ensuring the prevention of any act. first of all, we set ourselves up for failure. we set -- we've created an unreasonable expectation on the regulation and i would argue we done a disservice to this nation by suggesting that somehow we can have this risk-free society or this risk-free future and not pay prices. and not having that discussion about what those prices are, yeah, i have no respect for richard snowden. but i will say this. he's got and the conversation on the table. >> yes, please. >> one seconds. the mic is coming. >> my name is steve duncan. i'm going to fall upon what mike said with a couple of historical perspective. in 1936 when germany was building its airpower's ss as it could. there was a guy named churchill

who was arguing for increased defense spending. the government said no. and the prime minister indeed got up and said no, we shouldn't do that because we have no political mandate to raise defense spending and we can't afford. churchill got up by himself, not very popular at the time and said, you know, we must remember that the protection of the british country does not require a political mandate. it is the first order of duty of any british government. with that in mind when i was in the government prior to 9/11, in the defense department i made an official visit to israel and i was meeting with all of their national security leaders and i was impressed when i landed in tel aviv with security. i was talking to one individual and he expressed the view and the maven personal, when asked the question, what is your strategic approach to fighting terrorism? his answer was, well, we know we can't eliminate it, but we hope

that we can reach a point where it's politically acceptable in the number of events that happened and the magnitude of those events. i was thinking about that a few to go and i thought that was fine before 9/1 nine 9/11 and wn we're not thinking about weapons of mass destruction. mike's point about the technology. in my day we had to worry about missiles on soviet warheads. but now we're getting close to the point where you have to worry about one individual carrying a suitcase across an unprotected border. and if that's the case, how do we get our political leadership to be honest with the american people instead of avoiding the discussion, be candid that we may have to pay a price, and a big price in our civil liberties to do what the constitution says, which is protect american people as the first part of government? remember it was the great emancipator, a guy named lincoln who suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the civil war and when asked, he said well, it might make sense to cut off a limb to

say the body but it would make no sense at all to kill the body in order to save the limit. we need the discussion along these lines because our political leaders i think are a mess and explaining to the american people that there's a real price to be paid and as the technology advances the price make it higher and higher. we didn't have a right of privacy until justice douglas wrote an opinion in the 1970s. while that may be firmly established now, we have to take this in perspective of what is at stake and we need real political leadership, not ignoring the thing in leaving it to the people who have a vested interest that we need political leaders to discuss this with the american people, big time. 1965. >> any member on the panel? i would like again to call our attention once again that it's not only an issue for the united states. it is a global issue that

affects many other nations. we mentioned some of the democracies in europe, and no weight in light of what's happened, no one in norway dreamt about this possibility of massacre, and so forth. and i can report to you again the conversations we had just several days ago, in iraq discussing the likelihood or possibility -- in ankara, in some city and north africa or any get. so again, it's not a question of if but when and where and with what impact. and that's why i think it is critical to look at this not only on a national level but also on the global level.

we do have -- spirit another comment on the technology. he does every time we've had this discussion in a couple of seminars like this at the potomac institute we've also had an upstairs in our think tank inside the think tank here at the potomac institute several times, and there's an issue of technology that always comes up. i'm always surprised that the general public doesn't realize this. i want to point out the issue of the technology right to because i think it's important that the general public here, c-span and across the nation, understands the capability to find outliers, if you will, to find lone wolves, where that technology has already progress to. in the civil sector, the commercial sector. not in the government. best example is, in credit card behavior if you take your credit card and try to take $1 worth of gas at any live with that credit card go to the bank and tried to withdraw all your money, that

credit card will go did. the credit card companies have built a profile of fraudulent behavior. they have profiled it very well. so the behavior of stolen art is so well understood that the computers will manage it and undercard will go dead on the spot. or you have to call and verify you are. this has gone further. all your frequent buyer programs at safeway, online, amazon, where you buy gas, all of that is computerized. all the metadata is available in the commercial world and its shared between us companies such that when you go to the supermarket and buy something and it prints out the certificates for you or discount cards, those cards are tailored for you because they have been profiling you. you do when amazon and buy a bunch of books, the next time you go on amazon it recommends to you looks exactly like the one you bought before. this profiling is so sophisticated, one of our young interns ate one of the best stories i've heard this year

about this. the graduate student talking about a friend of his in college came in astounded. young married couple. his wife got pregnant and before she had a chance to tell them that she was pregnant, he got an e-mail from one of the stores bishop at recommending baby products for him, congratulations on you on your wife. they so well understood and profiled him and his wife that are able to offering discounts before his wife could even tell them that she was pregnant. the commercial world is doing this metadata thing really well. compare that to the fact that the guy who killed 21 children up in the northeast earlier this year, the guy who killed half a dozen people here in washington a month and a half ago, they look back at their backgrounds. they stood up. all the neighbors said they stood out. their behavior was profiled. so we can build profiles so we can find these bad guys if we

want to. i joked with the people upstairs. google, amazon, microsoft no such good profiles of all of the people out there that if some radical went postal and killed one of my children, what -- couldn't isolate these countries and say, you have the ability to find them. you have the profile. i'm going to see for not helping us find him. the point of all this is, the technology has gotten to the point that if we want to find lone wolves, at least some of them, we probably could. therefore, the question of whether we want to compromise our civil liberties is not an academic question. it is a real question of whether it's time to do that or not. >> okay. any other comments? professor wallace once you always have the last word. would you like to come up here and -- >> files if you. i pretty much is that what is it.

my usual line is that yonah is too much and he wants us to share with them. so we had to pull all together everything yonah is especially the case is always lone wolves. we are all kind of wolves in the way, way back when. i would say, i just be what i said before. i've been whispering without. we talk about america and the great society we think it is an interesting contender problems or. i do think the issue is as we've been saying is how do we cope, we do not want to be down at the level of baghdad with all respect to any iraqi in the room. we want to survive with our values. and i will predict and all that money on it, we will. but it's going to take hard work and we will work at it and the courts, fisa court probably have to be a little bit different in the future. not at the may the -- metadata collection but down at the scopes. there's not that many. you can tell from the stories there's about 500 greece a year when you dig down into the telepathy metadata. it's hard -- spike bowman poppe

knows all about it. not because he's any special briefing. he just knows and we don't. i think we will make it. business to be done along the way so mike, all that technology will be helpful a thing. thank you. >> might, maybe you want to close it? >> yes. only with the comment that the seminars are meant to be the beginning of a discussion, not the end of the discussion. so hopefully we have stimulated your thoughts and your desire to be in baltimore. and hopefully that will lead to greater involvement with those, and a greater help on your part in informing the public and keeping the discussion going. it's only through that process will we ever hopefully be read resolving some of these issues. thank you for coming. thank you for your participation and i hope you will come back. >> thank you very much.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> president obama and the rest of the first found will take part in a service project ahead of the thanksgiving holiday today. before that though, the president will keep the 50 year tradition of pardoning a turkey for thanksgiving day. we will have live coverage starting at 1:20 p.m. eastern. it will be on c-span. defense secretary chuck hagel has sent out a message to personnel saying to all those deployed overseas

>> coming up this evening here on c-span2 we will bring you a symposium about genetics forensics and their use in the criminal justice system. also look at the public policy and privacy issues surrounding genome sequencing and the implications of prenatal genetics testing. again, that's tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. on c-span in primetime tonight we will go back 50 years ago today for remarks from president lyndon johnson as he addressed a joint session of congress reflecting on john f. kennedy's legacy. just five days after his assassination. you can see that tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> the '60s were -- the '60s were different.

[laughter] and there were a lot of things happening involving race, the breakdown in the structure of society. i was suddenly out of the seminary and in new england. and there were no rules. things were falling apart. and you know, without structure is very, very difficult to navigate. i was extremely fortunate to be at holy cross. i was extremely fortunate to still have had a residuum of the way i was raised and the structure is that the nuns had given me, structure the seminary had given me. i was also extremely fortunate because i had already been in predominantly white schools. i was the only black kid in my high school in savannah. so the transition to a school with very few blacks in a very difficult set of circumstances, academically and otherwise, i

had sort of a jumpstart. i was ahead of the game so i had something. so it allowed me to continue to do well. even though it was very difficult spent thanksgiving on c-span. hear from two supreme court justices. clarence thomas at 9 p.m., followed by a lenny kagan at 9:45 p.m. eastern. also this holiday weekend, four days of booktv on c-span2 including the life and art of norman wong grell. thursday at 9:30 p.m. on c-span3 american history tv, the 150th anniversary of the gettysburg address. >> on many campuses young women are talked as if they live in a oppressive site where girls are shortchanging schools, robbed of the self-esteem and adolescence and then channeled into

low-paying fields. once in workplace they are cheated out of 25% of the seller. they face invisible barriers and all sorts of forces that opened out and keep them back, keep them out of the high echelons of power. this picture just doesn't fit reality. it's distorted. the false claims that support it have been repeated so many times they been taken on this aura of truth. >> her critiques of lately century feminism and feminism and content the american culture have led critics to label her as antifeminist. sunday on in depth or questions for author christina hoff sommers life for three hours begin at noon eastern. looking ahead to the new year on in depth join we are talked to host mark levine and with it. booktv's "in depth" the first sunday of every month on c-spa c-span2. >> harvard kennedy school of government hosted a discussion in september about rick died in

the history of the effects of digital technology on journalism. we hear from john huey, one of the projects researchers and the from and to of "time" magazine.. this is about one hour 20 minutes. >> thank you, alex. and maybe a metaphor too farhan raising the veil on riptides. but i'll do my best. first of all i want to thank some people. also want to thank alex jonesmot for making the shortest in fellowship the best possible destination for a journalist saeking sanctuary, perspectivekg reinvigoration and greatirationt company. i think i'm speaking for both of my co-authors when i say that. u it's just a great place. r makino smoothly. nancy palmer, janel sims.

it feels like a home away from home and all three of us are happy to be home. to explain riptide ever so briefly. three world where he executives watch up on the shores of harvard university, all looking for a nest on the ground and trying to avoid all the work that would be involved in running to walk -- right -- write a 15 page paper. that seemed like too much to us. [laughter] journalism pioneer, paul sagan, a second-generation journalist with a background in newspapers, television, and journalism. me, an old reporter, editor,

and recently an escaped publishing executive. what we did is sat around and argued because we did not agree on a whole lot. we're all interested in the same topic and that is the digital disruption of the journalism business. our question was simple -- what happened? how do we blow it? book we have done different? -- what could we have done differently? we argued for a while and said we would do in the world history. histpry. -- history. we googled the topic and we found 77,000 articles on it. we decided to target the key institutions and decision-makers going back 35 years. the original idea was 10 key moments, 20 key people, we will

be in and out in a heartbeat. we met skepticism but found a godfather in nico miller. we went to and he said, this is a great idea. template fora which, frankly, we stole from "vanity fair." we improved on it. in terms of adding video. wegot some endorsement and ran into a graduate school student named alex remington. people do still find jobs in the newspaper business from harvard. he led us to josh, who was already been cited, but really the guy who made our fantasy become reality and did a great job. watching over it all was tom patterson. more importantly than his subtle his wife, lori, give us

the video camera that we used to interview all the 60 people. as we learn, we thought harvard with a fabulously wealthy institution. $30 million or whatever it is does not go to video cameras. [laughter] we got carried away. we did 63 interviews. we wrote a 44,000 word essay. the whole thing, in its entirety, and i don't want to discourage anyone from reading our project or looking at it, but the whole thing totals four 000 44,000 words -- 444, words which is more than gone with the wind, but less than "war and peace." it is doable. martin and his very distinguished panel were all

really grateful not only for the interviews but for coming here tonight to help us explain it. covertto give you little -- color from the road with some awards. david bradley of the atlantic media, huge, sweeping views of the potomac. it is what mobile dumb -- mobildom is supposed to look like in the movie. it is the first and last thing he shows you. we were going to interview eric schmidt. great electronic equipment. impossible to find out how to get electricity come out of the wall outlet. [laughter] we had to have a technician come and he said, it happens all the time. [laughter] i think it is one of the largest users of electricity in the world and they cannot lug something into the wall and it to work or it they do not know

anything. there is a vegan restaurant down the street where a reclusive guy made us meet him for breakfast. the most disruptive workspace award goes to andrew sullivan's apartment in greenwich village. two ancient dogs suffering from copd in the interview. if you listen, you can hear -- [ gasps] [laughter] arianne huffington was the only interviewee that refused to be video recorded. he won the got away was rupert more dark -- rupert murdoch who agreed in principle but think -- things keep coming up.

he had a very busy year. with that, i will turn it over to my colleague, martin, to get to the meat of the matter. [applause] >> [indiscernible] the newspaper association of america. of is the ceo and publisher washington post interactive. she placed two very important roles in this history. and of course, arthur sulzberger , jr., publisher of "the new

york times." i want to start with a question about the state of journalism. if you are a doctor and the state of american journalism was her patient, how would you assess the diagnosis? >> if you look at the data, you would be concerned. the number of journalists has gone down by about 30% in the last seven or eight years. newspaper resonant -- newspaper down by about 55%. you see a distance between the agile landscape. if you froze things right now, you would say, the patient needs a lot of work and there is a continued progress on that work. if you look forward there are some very exciting things on the horizon.

one of the things i am most excited about journalism is that your lists are essentially networks on their own. if you see some of the work that "the new york times" has done from a digital standpoint, you see what can be done. consumers want high-quality content and i think there is a big role for journalism in the future. if you froze a right now, that i would think you would have to say there has been a rough. of time and people need to focus on where the future models are going. >> i promise you, i would not have my lobbyist hat on. i would say that we are definitely in transformation. print revenue. the print circulation has -- since 2006.

the revenue is diversified. the audiences have never been larger. fully 70% of u.s. adults in any given week read a newspaper online, in print, or on mobile. audiences not a problem. it is the revenue that continues to be a real challenge. but the stuff that i read, estimates say it is leveling out. about usingnking dentistry instead of doctors. is that ok? i think we are losing our first teeth and growing our new teeth. it is painful. it is tough to lose teeth. we are seeing that happen. we know that what is coming is to the pointigger

of reach, bigger to the point of impact. we are now able to reach impact over on the world. when we started this business, that was impossible to imagine. >> following onto to that, one of the folks that we interviewed , we didn'tf this know at the time, although if you actually read between the lines, particularly in the part that excerpt it at the end in just sold "the washington post" to jeff bezos for $250 million. paid 350rs ago you million dollars for "the huffington post." it goes to show the relative values out there. do you think bezos got a better

deal than you? [laughter] >> i think when we bought it, many people western what the value was overall and how much we had paid for it. as we talk to investors, they think that "the huffington post" is worth a tremendous amount more than what we paid. ariannaon is that realized something distinctive about how information gets transferred and how people it.ed her in -- wanted the fact wek at have gone from zero to 100 million video views, it is a migrationn -- it is a of what we have bought to being one of the best brands in the world. i experience in newspapers and news started right outside this

room. i owned one in boston and we bought something all the square deal. it was a free newspaper that we stand out right up the street at cambridge. my viewpoint on where news and news points were going, i went down to m.i.t. and saw mosaic. i saw the information coming up on the screen and getting electricity -- electronically transferred. i walked back down and said to my partner, i don't know what the internet thing is, but i am doing it. i have never seen information be able to transfer that easily. a was able toarrian do that in a disruptive way. harry -- john henry from "the boston globe" in the front row.

i think the future is bright because that dna will be plugged in and transferred. i don't know how many subscribers "the new york times" has now, but i think i got a great deal on "the object and post." i think jeff got a great deal depending on what he does with it. on "thet to stay washington post" for a minute. you ran the digital division at the "post" and that it was integrated back into the parent. in retrospect, do you think it was a inevitable that the graham family would sell to someone like bezos or was or something that could've been done at some stage that would change that future? >> i don't think it was inevitable. i am probably not answering -- it is too hard to say. i think it is quite wise to sell

to him. they have been friends for quite a time and have similar values. think understanding the technology and having to understand an audience, which is something that newspapers didn't have to traditionally do but now really have to do it, is quite wise. os understands the subscription model and putting it into a private place. they will not have the pressure of being part of a public company. i don't know that it was inevitable. i admire the grams for doing it. ms.graha it took a lot of courage, in my view. >> arthur, the idea of a paper has changed dramatically over the last century. creators and the dominant distribution channels

are company like google, facebook, and twitter. we have sometimes chatted about the nature of an authoritative source in a highly fragmented world. if there is any one news organization in the united states that still probably has that as part of its dna, it is "the new york times." what is the nature of authority in a world where there are literally tens of thousands of highly vertical eyes -- verticalized publications on every topic? >> i think the nature of authority have not changed. i think authority is about eadth.cy, brett -- br it is about calling at euro mistakes when you make them and having experienced people on the .round

they don't perish you to the ground but, knowing the landscape of the story. i don't think that is less important -- i think it is grown in importance. how many news organizations bureaus around the country or the world where people actually work and live, in egypt or other places? i think that has not changed. era is of the digital the speed of information, the joy is the reach and the ability to take in points of view very quickly and bring that into some story slot. it is a remarkable opportunity for us all. of downside is clear -- all

everyone is looking at the photo of the boston bomber. everyone knows it's the boston bomber. he has been clearly identified -- except it is not him. theuse it is swept through digital world so fast and is picked up. that kind of accuracy is critical. especially at a time when decisions are being made so fast. >> let's go back to riptide for a moment. during your interview, tim, you spoke quite enthusiastically about a well's local journalism local journalism effort. since the interview, several things have been announced but you have decided to downsize the operation. do you talk about why? what is the nature of local journalism and why is it so hard? those of you who do not know, is a product that we rolled out in 900 communities

across the u.s.. the theory on it is what arthur just talked about it. it is the authoritative nature of local journalism. from a platform -- platform perspective, you had the receding nature of publications and news not getting invested at the same level. aggressivevery stance on our standpoint that local people living in local communities will want to local information and it is important to them. patch has basically gone from zero earnings to about 18 million unique visitors. its expansion was very rapid. we took a risk of the company to do it. patch has been looked at from the investment community as something you should do

privately. was aeory was that there massive disruption going on in news and information locally. there would be lots of consumer interest, lots of business interest, and from a bold standpoint we should not do a land grab, essentially, after that audience. what we announced over the summer was basically taking the models. have business there are 400 that have traffic where we don't have the business model where the sales there fast enough. we are going to partner with other companies. since we announced that, we have 10 or 15 companies, large companies, that have off-line newspapers, television stations around those areas where we have patches. the patches are in 900 of the best gdp communities of the united states. traffice equal or more

from the large media properties in those regions. there is a lot of interest on patch. i would say from a standpoint of an investment that matters, not a feature, but an investment, patch is probably the best -- single biggest investment in journalism and the united states and local communities. -- i think fatter the fact is that patch will continue to go on. need forh an acute information locally. looking forward on patch, you'll probably see a few partnerships. aol will probably own some of the patches -- the partnerships. audience and and energyrs what a lot of into patch which i think was very good for the country. i have had more newspaper people stop me saying, the patch is in

our city. they were afraid that you are going to get more aggressive. i'm not talking about some of the bigger companies that did that. localk patch helped fuel communities. they should be investing in it. to --oline, when we talk i don't know if you read his interview, he had commissioned a study and what he found is that the toughest problems economically are on the local side. many of your members are on the local side. can you talk about that now? you have heard him talk about patch from a newspaper's perspective. study?s bad as julius' >> the top 200 metro areas have the toughest time. when you go smaller than that,

it is actually stronger. that top 200 is a big number. coververy difficult to what companies covered in the past to my giving pressures on newsroom budgets and a dramatic cut in advertising revenue. oftentimes, the newspaper, and i'm not disregarding patch, but it shows that 85% of all media tv, radio, start from the newspaper. >> can you point to areas of invasion? what are the bright spots? timtalked about innovate -- talked about innovation. arthur talked about losing your baby teeth. you see evidence of that when you look at the landscape? >> absolutely.

>> are people losing their baby teething growing something new? >> hindsight is 2020. walled garden. if you want to advertise in washington, you had to advertise in "the washington post." the internet changes everything. on the digital side, you approach it as, well, you've just got to sell a bunch of banner ads and maybe that will make up for the major ones. that does not work. we sort of figured that out. we are looking at a lot of revenue streams. a huge change, even in the last five years. some agencies that have been started by companies, niche .rint publications there is no silver bullet.

theaw circulation go up for first time in many years last year with 23% print and digital alike. i'm seeing -- again, there is not a one-size-fits-all. what works for "the new york times" does not work for another newspaper. -- a smaller has paper has to know its market. fitted -- it is like owing to the dentist -- sadly, it is not true. >> we have not gotten to cavities yet. [laughter] i am seeing innovation and it is heartening. it is exciting. thehompson has talked about internationalization of the brand. i don't think there is ever been a newspaper that has been truly international.

obviously, the iht was small -- >> we are talking about something much larger with "the new york times." website went immediately when you turn it on, but turning is hard. revenue the "international herald tribune" is owned by "the new york times." rebranding it "the international new york times." we are bringing back a brand that did exist in the 50's and 60's if i'm not mistaken. this is a digital play. ih te web, if you went to om you ended up at the

new york times website. we are trying to reach the international community that we believe is out there for an international newspaper. journal," have been doing this. they are not general interest. it will be an exciting opportunity for us. our first language was in china. we wrote a story that upset the chinese government. they shut us down for about a year now. the story did win a pulitzer prize, so there is a trade-off there. that really speak to our core values there. we know this story was going to cause heartache for us in a business we had just invested in and opened. but our core values are two critical to who we are and -- r. -- who we are.

say, when ick and travel, it is clear that there is a lot more for us to do to -- to reach our international potential. "the international new york times" is just a step. if you want to subscribe, we to dogive you the ability that. we are fixing that. that is an easy example. there is much more we could be doing, but there is no doubt that the desire is there. heard the short -- a story, but i will share it. when i was china just prior to us launching the chinese language website, i met with a couple of chinese generals. , a woman,m interestingly, began our

conversation by really talking in an angry way. she was very upset. we had just begin to charge for the web not too long ago and the problem was that every morning she would wake up and the first thing she would go to nytime s.com to see what was happening in the world and it would not accept her credit card. did not accept those credit cards. we fixed her problem. the point is that a chinese general, first thing in the morning, would go to "the new york times." if that does not speak to the changing nature of the world and the opportunities we have, i cannot think of what else does. >> i want to follow-up with the other end of it. we had our interview, we talked about the media model. i want to go down the road on that for just the second with

you, arthur. we talked in the interview about young people. the notion that young people don't seem to be as willing to pay for content on the web. music is a good example of that. do you think that, as young people mature, they will be willing to pay for a digital subscription to the new york times? more, young people and all people are showing a willingness to pay for experiences they value on the web or in -- web. thank you, steve jobs. it is now simple to buy games, by something you find of value at a number of ages. that is changing. let's not thing is,

attend a 14-year-old spot newspapers. they did not. they never did. people come to newspapers when they find the need for the value equation. that is often when they get a first job, or they have a family and they start to think about what the community is offering and what public schools -- and they start to engage with the community in a different way. absolutely i think those things are coming together. i want to go to your content strategy. it is really interesting. i think you create some content and then you sell access or you do deals with people like everyday health, provide access to your audience. how you makelaine the decision of what you cover and what other people will cover? at how you do that? toour strategy is

essentially -- we have a theory that most people care about a limited set of things. 70% of web users use less than 15 sites a month. older,le tend to get their time becomes more valuable as well. people start to spend more times on things they focus on. we have started this 80/80/80 strategy. 80% based onwomen, influence events, and 80% on mobile. consumption that happens is about the economy and what people care about. we put a filter on the

categories we have from a content perspective and try to figure out where we will have huge influence where we invest in. crunchrunning tech disrupt in san francisco. i'm headed out there tomorrow. there are 3000 of the most influential engineers in the country, in the world, their right now. almost every major ceo from the industry will be there on the stage. at byunch gets looked anyone around the world was interested in the technology space. there is an example of a space where we have a major share of and we can be successful from a journalism and monetary standpoint. that was the first generation of our strategy, get in a giant space and be influential. the second generation of the strategy has been to build out massive partnership networks around those areas. brands, a number of

techcrunch, movie phone. b2bave also built a huge infrastructure. we service about 140,000 other publishers with content sharing. believe thatly technology will not change humans, that humans will change technology. the first couple of generations on the web has been people trying things. they will start regulating back to things they most care about. last year, i had our interns do the dinner at the end of the summer to get feedback on the company. last summer, i asked them about the changing patterns they were having as a college student. there were three. one is they were following things on twitter. second thing was they were

following more influential brands, "the new york times" was one they talked about. they were following the highly level influence of people. the third thing is they were changing their personal profiles on the web. they don't want their personal profiles to be dictated by a giant social network that has all kinds of information on them. a lot of them had started to migrate information towards linkedin where they want to have solid profiles. not to look for jobs, just to have that level of area. strategy is let's invest in the most important areas of journalism, information, and content, build giant be to be information to around them. it pretty much dictates everything we do. how does "the covington post" get into that? huffington post" get

into that? >> it is a triple play for us. we started this thing called serenity saturdays. we launched the hawaii addition. first blogger we had talked about opera. with "the huffington post" you have a global platform now. i think it is going to be aggressively be mobile information source. >> arthur, are you doing it in language? >> at the moment, it is halted. we are still producing it, getting lots of traffic, but not from within china. "huffington post" is a trusted brand. people want news everyday on a global basis. it,ou look at why we bought

it we saw something that looked like it could be indicted by more globalization. with a new pope was elected, we had "the huffington post italy" putting real-time content on the u.s. and i think we have some of the most unique coverage about the pope been chosen. there are other examples of that. it fits squarely into the content strategy i described. >> got it. okay. i think we're going to turn to the audience now. and there are three groundrules. that i've been asked to assess for you. one is that all questioners must identify themselves, accurately. [laughter] accurately. number two is that there is one brief question per person. please, no speeches. and third is questions and with

the question mark. seems self-evident to me. that's what it says. we have one, two, three, four mics and i try to get to questioners on each mic over the next 20 minutes or so. 25 minutes. let's begin. >> i am formally a "new york times" reporter for about 13 years. i'm struggling with this issue of how you find news and how it's going. one of the things i worry most about is the content that the reporters are putting out there. e-mailed of time, the number of interviews each reporter is able to do to produce a story. i'm worried that isn't shrinking. if that is inevitable that will go to shorter, punchier stories and not get quite as many introduced? >> arthur? >> i do not believe it is inevitable. there's no question that on a breaking news story speed now

can -- for everybody, the boston bombing, my colleagues at the globe know this. you know, the traffic they got, the traffic the time scott, the immediacy during the presidential election. we had better traffic covering the actual election than television networks. the people are coming to news organizations now for video content for the immediate, deliberate. all that said, are we still engaged in the long form journalism? absolutely. and i will use snowfall as a great example of how you can create long form journalism were a journalist will spend a year working on a story, and you can integrated video and traffic and you can turn into an experience unlike anything that we used to

be able to do in our old days. so i think it really does depend on the story, but this is why quite frankly you still need to invest in the journalist. and you're looking for a different set of experience as. i was on a train coming up here from new york, and david brooks was actually in the same car with me. is going to yale where he's done some teaching. he was talking about the washington bureau he joined 11 years ago. and the washington bureau he's part of now. and quite frankly its younger, more vibrant, let's just say there's a lot more diversity. because ya videographers. you have the technical team that is there to perform. and it's still a very, very powerful operation. >> want to get to you in a second. i want ask you one question with respect to the "huffington post." how much of your stuff is now red on smartphones, mobile

devices? how does that change the form factor? >> a lot. basically depending on what section you're on, it could be 30, 40% of the traffic that is mobile. also with the mobile changes, people consume more news with mobile. if you take something like "the new york times" and looks at their usage, you look at somebody reads the desktop of the newspaper, once you add mobile they don't switch the consumption 100%. they add consumption. on average if you look at the pew research, people at about 30% consumption to that. i think on the form factor second one thing that's a little cloud on the web right now is there sort of the old model of audience development. .. not a whole lot of facts to get an audience and then there is journalism. if you read the first book, he talks about how he invested in the -- sisters.

they would write stories so horrific that would make people cry. right next to it, he would have the hard news. >> that is what is happening on the web today. here's the bad news. you don't have arthur's rand. you have to do things to gain traffic. they will be more aggressive about mixing low quality, high quality together. >> the other thing i would say is that there has been a huge shift in content. --rt from smaller newsrooms 10 years ago, a metro paper would send 15 people to the olympics. a bunch of them. is that really necessary? as you are seeing a lot more information about audiences, another of newspapers -- a number of newspapers are collapsing into radio and a

newspaper newsroom. but really but then really investing on the investigative side and beingsp much more specificec about the areas they are going to invest in from the investigative side so that whole area is changing and it's pretty interesting. >> my apologies. >> ima graduate student and first ii want to thank all of u for being here into doing this. what an incredible opportunity. i want to follow on the conversation of journalism. there was reference to that in the sun cities or areas it is profitable and other areas it isn't so much.

>> from the newspaper, you know, still people trust newspapers. you read something by somebody in those communities and it's a lot different than a fee then af somebody who doesn't. so that is the baseline for living in understanding a community. >> i'm a junior at college and at the campus editor for the harvard political review. the harvard political review has changed from a print publication to now having an online presence for culture has changed and we have a much larger publishing board, so i wonder what it's been like cultural lawyers and what you look for in journalists involved in the organization. "the new york times" puts up biggio and there is so many things on the site.

what is it like working for "the new york times" 20 years ago? >> that's a good question. do you want to take it first? >> one of my colleagues just retired and was responsible for doing a lot of high hearing at time in the newsroom and the transition. but let's agree as an industry that is what we didn't focus on fast enough. we need to have engineers building the systems that we are now using, building the tools that we are now using and that is indeed where i would say the most challenging is getting those engineers and as we think about the new product development that we are creati

creating. we are in the middle of working. why should we be offering "the new york times," and that's it so we are going to create products aimed at a younger audience to the point made earlier in the conversation, giving a different experience. we have drilled upon that and highly engineered because it is going to have to be a different experience across the devices. that's where i think we probably missed a beat the biggest. but clearly, our journalists .. our training and hiring and training but, you know, so far in journalists on the web are the ones now able to have video become a part of that experience. some have been doing it very well for a long time.

but we need more of that. we've doubled the amount of video on that in the last month i think. we are all doing it. we are all looks through mentoring and we realize the video to your point earlier in his different mobile than it's going be on the large screen. so there's a lot out there for us. >> who were those interns that you were talking about? >> we have a big intern program and people ask .. the journalism front basically just from learning .. and i have to do this myself. there's two pieces of advice. one is you have to actually use the platforms themselves, and i think that the journalism is in the new teeth growing stage and you can't be a journalist if you don't understand the platforms and where things are going to have to try them.

the second thing that i think is not a bad idea is instead of pulling up a chair next to another journalist every time you go to sit down us pull up a chair next to an engineer and one of the things i saw at the post which was really impressive was the journalists and engineers sat together. in many places that wasn't the thing. the journalist side with the journalists and the huffington post really helped the whole company rethink that process. by the way come in the silicone valley i spent 20 years going back and forth. that is a more collaborative type of environment. but i would ask you where the five fastest growing platforms that journalism puts the content on faster and do you have an account on them and that is essentially what i ask internally and i expect i need to know it's coming you need to know it, it's really important.

>> over here. >> ima harvard alum. very high-profile series called house of cards into the decision to release all of the episodes at one time playing with the idea of when do you time he tiee effectively? nbc and other affiliates have begun to give limited interviews and broadcast long interviews in ththeir morning shows like the daily show. so my question is for "the new york times" or aol or other providers how are you experiencing with more reporting and bundling or release the content either as one entire package or to get parcel it out and engage more technical. >> i think that we are all experimenting. i think i mentioned football earlier. there was a huge section. it was the story about a terrible tragedy that took place skiing up a mountain in

washington state i think. it was a full section, but the experience on the web was so immensely powerful because of all of the video, graphics, unless you go and see this i can't possibly do it justice. but when the woman was skiing and caught in the avalanche and the next thing you know she is under the snow and she's fighting for her life and by the way, there's th there is the vir talking to you about it right there it brings it to life in a way. so a lot of it is experimenting and we put stories up on the web obviously before they are in the paper. we put magazine pieces that starting wednesday.

but you mentioned earlier about the vices and changing the way people come to us. and you are right. we see on the tablets people come to stories at 9:00 at night, eight to ten because people want to see what is in tomorrow's paper. so we just have to -- and i'm one of them, but that's part of the power. >> i think that netflix was normal distortion windows were set up for those economics and things have been said human beings would probably behave different if you gave them the content all at once. so any testing way in a thoughtful way we actually look at disruptive, how do you actually disrupt the behavior,

and one saying i have internally we don't do a lot of sports, but i tell people you can't beat espn sportscenter by being 5% better. you have to be 75% or 100% better, and the only way to do that is to be disruptive. when we look at doing disruptive things around journalism, the window of what you do is actually the disruption played as the content itself. then the second one is distribution partnerships. and i think one thing we are all probably working on your name off the distribution of google and facebook. another way to be disruptive about when you release content and how is actually using those partners to do that as well so we have a multitier strategy that i would point out that flicks from a brilliant standpoint recognizing the difference between human behavior and how distributions were set up and then went for human behavior and they've done an amazing job. >> we are going to go full circle now to this microphone.

>> i'm sorry -- >> i apologize. go ahead. >> i am a junior at the college interested in broadcast journalism and my question was given the fact that there are so many organizations now that offer news videos online where do you see the future of tv click. >> basically if you look at the condoms and patterns of how people use phones in the tablets into those things, the fact of the matter is that average tv show is if you took a half hour or 22 minutes of content and eight minutes of commercials when you watch how people basically use the web enabled platforms in general, i think in a disruptive way there is a faster way of getting people tons of information. so i think that you will see the

absent and the scale of faster, high quality content overall and i think that people still want trusted brands and trusted people as much of the world seems like it is user generated-based content when you ask their interns what they are following they are not randomly going out to just find the information. they want someone to tell them i just met with somebody that is really well known in an off-line content | friday and i said why do you think you're successful and she said because i tell people what they want and what they need. she said i tell them so there is a future of television and web video together that is going to be a very highly curated descriptively time based almost like the netflix question about how much content you get and in what time period and i think

that there is a disruption. >> i'm a sophomore as well as a photographer and a writer for the political review. i was interested in anecdote that you mentioned about the woman that read "the new york times" every day. how have your publications changed to be able to convince one of the worldwide readers to read your publication into similarly how have you managed to maintain the radar for example why should i read the nsa news from "the new york times" or the huffingtonpost as opposed to going to the guardian or some other publication click. >> it's a very good question and there is no simple answer to it. as i mentioned, we are going to be rebranding the tribune, and part of that is to further tighten the journalistic ties so that we will have a newsroom in paris and london, a newsroom in

hong kong, new york, and what we are looking at is a 24 hour news cycle. when people are asleep in new york and waking up in china and asia, we want the ability for them to come to the site and see more of the asian point of view. we will put different stories and great places, and of course all of this is by the fact that more and more people can create the content experience as a value. they care about sports they can put that higher. they care about politics they can put that higher. so it's about that kind of human adaptation as well.

so, but could be an ongoing issue as we learn more and more how to do this. no question. >> our strategy has been to partner with local news providers in countries so most of our addition to the local large media partner, france as an example so we believe that we are getting the best of what is local and friends together. example i use is the pope but i think it is really competitive. >> is also political industry plaintiff view issue? is part of what you're getting at is that it's a political side as well as a journalistic side? i don't know. i'm just asking. >> there's no question that's an important point.

the challenge is how do we make sure that the experience -- we are getting the new york point of view. we have to make sure that we are giving people a broad breadth. >> that is one of the beautiful things about the internet is that you can go to the guardian and "the new york times" and you can go and they may cover a story differently than the guardian so that is an advantage that we all have. >> i'm asking this on behalf of the john f. kennedy committee. with regard to social media, how have you as journalistic companies viewed it because many complex ideas cannot be convinced to 140 characters of a hindrance of reporting consider responses or has an impetus shared in that capacity

overruled any sort of negative effect of social media? >> do you want all free to answer requests. >> whoever has any thoughts. >> just a general question. >> i think twitter is almost like a caption to a photograph and if engaging you are going to go find more about what they have to say about something. sometimes people use twitter as a i'm going to say whatever i think and to ge indicating trour so it sort of depends but i think it is a sort of caption. >> is thaisn't it just a giant distribution clicks. >> it's a powerful tool and it's a tool for getting information as well as getting information out into the challenge for journalists is to be able to sift through the information that you are getting to make a story a generally complex story

understandable. >> people debate this right now but twitter is launching cards and other things. so what started as a feeder for information quickly now they are building a more infrastructure inside of twitter. so one of the things our brand is doing is starting to build more inclusive pieces of content that actually sit inside of twitter so you not only get the link that you have a longer experience and i think a lot of the newspapers are doing it. so that is where twitter is today and where it is good to be in the future i guess is they are going to build up their destitution capabilities and its best-known for the short but i think you will see other things get longer on those platforms. >> a lot of journalists view twitter for source material. >> it's not pretend this is new. this is something that newspapers and journalists have had to deal with for decades.

we don't remember what it was like when all of a sudden you could pick up a telephone and you were not dealing with your source one-on-one. but it had a big impact and people said you can't trust what people are going to say over the wire and go back even further, the telegraph. because a publisher wrote in his own newspaper and it was not "the new york times" that he had just witnessed the death of newspapers. literature buffs will surprise you could survive that newspapers must stay that way you jihad just the telegraph. what they didn't understand is this is going to feed information. so it is a tool that we are all getting better and better at using. social made ea is an extension.

>> i will be presenting the official player question for tonight's forum. the question primarily addresses goes off of what someone asked a few questions ago. how you can now sort of choose your political angle based on the website you like online. because of the combination of huffingtonpost and aol, you now have the opportunity to talk to millions of people who may not be using the internet to obtain news you are able to feed them political information. so how you go without northwesterly choosing because you discuss how the formula for choosing what you feed the people that go on aol and are exposed to the huffingtonpost but how do you basically choose the angle in which you share this information. >> so aol and huffingtonpost basically there's a lot of stories from huffingtonpost on aol and will continue to be. there is also a news chooser you

can customize the news you want overall. the other thing that i would say i think the huffingtonpost started probably with more of a political angle and one thing that has happened a lot if you look through the huffingtonpost is overtime there has been a lot of forearms set up for people with different views to share so the huffingtonpost if you go to huffingtonpost live there is a wide range of views and one of the things we thought was important is you have different brands and by using the huffingtonpost i think it is one of the best news sources in the world to offer aol users but we also offer the aol users different choices as well. and i think actually from a standpoint of opportunity, this is different than where i and vf our competitors are going. the competitive is going to feed

base and there is no voice at all and one of the things we have done is fed we are going to have a voice and some opinions about things if we want to save people time by doing that over also try to give people multiple views and voices but we like the huffingtonpost into the users like the huffingtonpost if you look at the facebook stats were twitter, people look at huffingtonpost and we offer that to aol users but we give them aa choice of what news source you want. >> i am a sophomore and i work with sam and paul on the political review. so in the recent years we've seen an amazing increase in the number of ways you can do it interactive, through video, photos and diagrams and even with the boston marathon the most shared thing was an interactive how it happened rather than an article describing how it happened so my

question would be what do you see and place of the virginia's article is the future of journalism? >> [inaudible] i will preface the comment with i think the written word provided out of context but something immediately can image or a video can't provide. as i was reading today, the report having to do with this conference there is a lot of context that's nothing other than the written word could really come they so i think it is context more than anything else. >> if you think about the technology changes of the last 100 years, the internet is the

first one to bring it back to the written word. the radio took us away from the written word, television took us further away from the written word and the internet, the web b gave us the ability to integrate back. so i'm actually a huge fan for a number of reasons because the technology does give you the ability to engage in all different methods and what we are learning over and over is using any single method is fairly or. it's the multiplicity of that is integrated with each other that is breathing real success. >> i think that we are .-full-stop cole again. >> i am a freshman and mr. armstrong ivy league earlier if i interpreted correctly you said that not just anyone can be a journalist. i'm not sure if i did interpret,

but what about blogs and how have they disrupted the professional media and how are journalists working to go around these people that might just sit around and steal from different websites? >> i think anyone can be a journalist if they want to be a journalist. i think at the end of the day when you think about consumers are smart and i think over a period of time, they know who is feeding the consistent information and those who want. i would say i don't want to make it public, but hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers in the time. my guess is if you started doing content that was things people didn't want to pay for so he wouldn't have that adobe, and i think that for me to suc disrupe standpoint -- let me take a step

back. what you see in the community overall and across the internet is people almost like the netflix example of taking advantage of situations to be disruptive to gain audience. you basically disrupt the information flow up with happening at larger publications. i have been a huge investor in those things but the reality is i think there's a book called park rose. if you read the book, you see something inside of those books that is the same thing happening on the web right now which is people are using different forms of content bloggers, twitter feeds to disrupt people's flow and there's a difference between the journalism of people in the

development and then what happens is they turn it into journalism. there is very well-known properties that started off as disruptive and us soon as they got enough audience and they said we can make this into a business they said was moved more towards journalism come and there's 15 great examples of those on the website. i think they can be very powerful and i think also, you know, you look at youtube for instance if you look at the number of youtube users that have categories that are disruptive, you find people that become a blogger but there's an opportunity for people to be disruptive things of other things. >> for journalists to become successful bloggers and extend their footprints not only for the institution they represent but individually. into the journalist brand is the subject all of us have to be spending time dealing with.

>> my apologies but we only have time for one more question and in deference to minus 64, i will turn to this microphone and use -- >> i am a freshman at harvard college and there's talk of a bunch of new people coming online with conflict zones so i was wondering how that might change the target audience for online journalism. >> that is a great question. anyone of you can take it. we have roughly a billion people online. >> they talk about 5 billion

people online. how does that change all of your purchase to the content journalism? >> it is a great question and a great opportunity. a year and a half ago, what was the largest country outside the united states outside the u.s. where people come to see "the new york times" and wouldn't you want to take a guess? coming to "the new york times" after the u.s. with canada, the uk was next, australia was number three. but you get the vodka making the list language.

outside of the u.s. china was number one. and this was before -- this was in english. so, that i think speaks very much to your thoughts. the possibility of our growth, the possibility of the value of the quality information that maybe they can't get in others or devices really speaks to the opportunity. >> there's a lot of people working on low-flying satellites and things that would actually increase the broadband capabilities and while they are going to come on line at the opportunity -- >> it just accelerates the integration of arthur talked about for storytellin